Millbrae, San Bruno hop on BART train

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, January 23, 2003

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BART's Route To SFO. Chronicle Graphic

BART's Route To SFO. Chronicle Graphic

Millbrae, San Bruno hop on BART train

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San Bruno and Millbrae long have been quiet little towns along the Caltrain line, hemmed in by economics and geography and by a 40-year-old refusal by San Mateo County supervisors to consider joining BART.

As a result, while other communities have been transformed into wealthy centers of business and commerce, San Bruno and Millbrae have been overlooked by the economic reformation that turned much of the region into a high-cost enclave and rebuilt the financial profile of a dozen cities.

Now, cheek-by-jowl, San Bruno and Millbrae are betting on the buzz-phrase that currently dominates the thinking of regional planners -- transit-oriented development.

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In the next few months, certainly by midyear, the new BART extension to San Francisco International Airport will open, bringing with it a line that extends through San Bruno and Millbrae and includes a station in each city.

Each city has eagerly regarded the arrival of the mass transit system as an opportunity to plan a bigger, brighter future.

In San Bruno, where nearly 9,000 BART riders are expected by 2010, plans for Tanforan Shopping Center, the long-struggling regional mall that will be the site of the new BART station, include a $100 million renovation.

When it's done, BART riders will be able to walk to a food court or a multiplex movie theater, according to some early public plans.

San Bruno has installed new lanes and traffic lights on El Camino Real to direct transit-related auto drivers to Tanforan. And city voters last year approved construction of a hotel-residential-commercial project at an old Naval shipyard that clearly is meant to be part of a larger BART-oriented development.

"We led the fight 10 years ago to achieve what we're achieving," said City Manager Frank Hedley.

In Millbrae, where daily ridership is expected to be 33,000 by 2010, city officials want their town to be a regional transit hub. They've built a landmark transit station that can accommodate BART, Caltrain and SamTrans.

More than 100 acres surrounding the station are planned for housing, retail and commercial development in a master plan that will turn the area into a gateway to the city's quaint downtown.

City Administrator Jim Erickson said, "We look at the Millbrae station area as being the heart of the city's economy."

Mayor Linda Larson said the BART line is eagerly anticipated, but she acknowledged that the economic slowdown has meant a slowdown in the city's plan.

Larson, the spinmeister, said the delay will "give us a chance to live with the beast . . . to put our arms around this new resident."

It also is a chance for San Bruno and Millbrae to spring ahead of its neighboring communities to the south, where the living has seemed just a little bit easier.

"This will put us on the map," said one San Bruno merchant.

San Bruno has been on the map as a city since 1914. It once billed itself as "the airport city," and it's true that its borders abut SFO. But SFO historically has made more noise than money for the town of 42,000.

Millbrae, population 21,000, became a town in 1948, largely to assure that an expansive private estate would be converted to homes, rather than other unsavory activities. Until the 1950s, gambling was legal in Millbrae, another instance of San Francisco exporting its faults to hapless Peninsula communities.

Both cities were meant to be bedroom suburbs of San Francisco, a fate guaranteed by the absence of any room to grow. Both are situated on the narrowest part of the Peninsula, with the bay to the east, the Crystal Springs watershed to the west.

So, while San Francisco declined as a regional employment center and Silicon Valley spread up the Peninsula, most communities found room to grow, approved office buildings and corporate campuses, and then watched their local restaurant and service businesses boom.

At the same time, San Bruno and Millbrae watched their downtown communities deteriorate and their economic limitations become more pronounced.

In Millbrae, hotel construction near the airport became the major economic factor -- 38 percent of the city's $13.5 million general fund comes from hotel taxes, a fluctuating source of income.

In San Bruno, despite the construction of an office complex at the north end of town, the ninth largest employer remains the Loyal Order of the Moose.

All that is going to change.

San Bruno and Millbrae have tried to embrace the change and mold it to their own vision.

It's untried ground. Certainly, there have been places where a transit- oriented project has been built and ballyhooed.

But San Bruno and Millbrae are the first established communities in the Bay Area to stake their entire economic future on the promises of BART.